Workiva Inc (WK) September 2026 Conference Transcript

I think we can go ahead and get started. Thank you all for coming today. I have the pleasure of hosting Workiva CEO, Julie Isco. Julie, thank you for being here with me today. We're going to touch on some near-term dynamics, but first I'd like to start with your longer-term view of the business. So Julie, when you look five years out, what do you want Workiva to become today that it's not?

Well, let me start by saying what it is today, and WorkEva is a trusted platform for the office of the CFO. We manage the data that matters most for that office, and what we have become is a platform that is managing regulatory work for customers in three key categories, financial reporting, non-financial or sustainability reporting, and then GRC, or Governance, Risk, and Compliance, which is audit, risk controls, et cetera. So that's what we do today, those three categories, and we do primarily the reporting around those categories. But as we've evolved and as new technology like AI, and particularly Agendic AI, has come into the scene, we've been transforming our platform, Agendic first, And the combination of the platform that we have today with that transformation and AI, in particular agentic AI, what we are able to do now is expand into the broader realm of regulatory work, even beyond the categories that we do today. but it's also doing more than just the report itself. With Agentec AI, which is planning and reasoning and executing and taking action, there is the opportunity for us to actually help customers stay compliant. So the idea that we become a platform for companies to rely on for regulatory work is something we see ourselves evolving to over the next several years. Five years is a lifetime in technology, so that question is hard to look at. But in the direction the platform is going, the strength that we've built with the platform, the expertise that we have in regulatory work and the trusted customers and so forth, we're able to expand more broadly into other realms beyond what we do today in regulatory disclosure and regulatory work.

So sort of in that same vein, when you think about that longer-term vision, which part of that do you think investors are still underappreciating?

I think it truly is 100% that we have these earned advantages. And I call them earned because over the last decade and a half we've been building the platform and we have over 6,000 enterprise customers all over the world that trust us. They trust us enough to put their data with us, their pre-public data in our platform, their financial data, their non-financial data, their controls and risks and so forth. So we've got that. When you have those customers that trust you and you can learn about them and their business and that goes into your platform that becomes more agentic capable, you really can serve those customers in a better way. We can do more for them. We can onboard them easier. we can more quickly bring them to value with every new piece of regulatory work that we do. So I think that is huge. That distribution is considerable. We also already connect to their technology ecosystem where so much of that data is accessed. So the fact that we are already in, that we have the technology, that agentic AI is here, and that we can move quickly, like a startup, we're able to go build these capabilities far faster. We're able to bring more value to the customer and serve them on the platform. So I truly think that those earned advantages are really not yet well understood or appreciated and what that can do for us as we move into the coming quarters and years.

So I want to ask a little bit about the 2030 framework that you've laid out. Sort of a two-part question. When you think about that framework, what gives you the confidence in it? And at the same time, which part of that plan, in your view, carries the greatest execution risk?

Sure. I mean, we're very thoughtful, as we are in our guidance consistently, quarter after quarter, year after year. So when we put that framework out, we thought through what it would take to get there, both on the top line and the bottom line, and felt confident and still do. In fact, we had a 2027 target and 2030 target, and in our last earnings call release, we talked about meeting the 2027 target already this year. So that leaves us with a focus on 2030. So we feel confident we've laid out a plan, and we understand how to get there. I think it really is up to us around execution. Even though top line and bottom line, one, of course, is more controllable than the other. One is probably more challenging to ensure than the other. But it's all about executing. It's about executing on the top line. It's about that new customer's account expansion and retention and continuing to be consistent there. And on the bottom line, it's just improved operational effectiveness and efficiency, as you've seen us do and continue to improve on our margins. So we feel very comfortable with what we've laid out.

So sort of on the top line, subscription revenue growth has remained at, above, or roughly around 20% for the past several quarters, even as you've continued to scale. So when you look out to those longer-term targets, what has to continue to go right to sustain a mid-to-high teens growth rate over the next several years?

I mean, we have a strong strategy. It's our fit-for-purpose high-value solutions. It's our platform that continues to get more open and intuitive. It's our partner ecosystem strengthening. And it's global expansion. And we're continuing to execute on that. And that really is it. On the top line, as I mentioned, going after new logos. And last quarter we had our highest new logo count in seven quarters. We need to continue expanding. And that is discipline. That is having the right capability on the go-to-market side. We have moved into profiles of sellers that know how to work with our partners, that embrace partners, that know how to sell in large accounts with executives that are higher up in the organization. They can do account planning, multi-category, multi-solution sales. So it really is the discipline and the rigor with which you go to market, and it's focusing both on account expansion and new logos, and then, of course, retention, keeping the customers engaged, happy, and getting the value from WorkEva.

So you mentioned the strong new logo performance last quarter. What, in your view, were the main drivers of seeing that jump up so much, as you mentioned?

I think this ebbs and flows, and we didn't put it in our earnings release. It was more a sideline when somebody asked a question on it. But I think this past quarter we are seeing two things happen. One, we're seeing the results of some efforts that we put in on the go-to-market side. A while back we started in on having a hunter-farmer model. We started small with one or two teams, and we've expanded that a bit. So that's one thing we're getting the motion down. It's execution and focus. And then we also had some capital markets strength. The market came back a bit. And those, even though we do sell before we have an S1 and before we sell an S1 in a capital market solution, oftentimes we'll sell private company financial reporting and private company controls. But sometimes that is a new logo, so when we have strong quarters, that could contribute as well. But it really is, again, focus and execution. We have always strived to keep a good blend of new logo growth and expansion every quarter, and we've noticed as we've been expanding TAM that sellers have focused on expansion. So our new logos, you know, we dropped down to maybe 40%, and, you know, we wanted to 35%, and so we wanted to put more emphasis on the new logo. So we are focused on that as well. So it's execution, and it's, you know, different solutions are stronger in new logos than others at different times. So we don't, you know, look at it as.

Yeah, I mean, to that note, one of the things that you've been benefiting from recently is customers are increasingly buying several solutions at the outset. What has changed in the way customers are viewing the platform that's sort of driving that?

So I will say, again, it comes down to execution. We are getting better in our go-to-market on the platform concept, right? And customers are actually seeing value. It's resonating. I think platform wins the day, even before AI. Solutions together, single vendor, a lot of CIOs and CFOs want that. I know I do as a buyer, and I was a CIO. and if I can extend a contract to get the capability in and it's best of breed, I'm going to do that with a vendor I already have. Just so many benefits from consolidating on a single platform. But also, the capabilities work better together. You have data that is connected, right? Your controls and your risks and your audit all connect to your financial capability, financial reporting and your non-financial reporting. So they play better together. And certainly, when you are applying AI, If you have the data in one common platform, you get more effective outcomes with that AI. And again, it's going back to WorkEva and the value of WorkEva, which is that everything in WorkEva, that data, that trusted data, it is traceable. Back to source system, you've got data lineage. You can see every change, who made change, who approved changes. everything is auditable, everything is traceable, and everything is defensible for the CFO.

And so as customers consolidate more of their reporting and risk workflows on the Rekiva platform, where do you see the greatest opportunity to replace some of the incumbent vendors?

Sure. And we've been doing that for a long while now. We compete against a Microsoft or a Google in the office of the CFO. They are Microsoft or Google shops. And because we have fit-for-purpose capabilities that blame the office of the CFO well, we're able to displace. But really, I would say, importantly, in areas where data is fragmented, systems are fragmented, where things are manual is where we really have an opportunity to come in and replace. And I'll give you a good example. When companies upgrade their ERP system or bring new ones in, there's an opportunity there for the customer to leverage one single ERP where they may have collected some from acquisitions and so forth. They may have a lot of them around and they buy one, and then they want to do multi-entity reporting, and that might be a good way where we need to be displacing some of those fragmented systems and come in and take on the responsibility for multi-entity capabilities, multi-entity reporting. So really that is where it lies on those legacy systems and displacement. And then when we think about expansion today, you know product breadth sales execution implementation capacity or customer readiness of those four things you know which one is the biggest constraint on expansion i mean today we have you know upwards of two dozen solutions we have a huge opportunity for expansion i would say you know 50 plus of our base has only one or two solutions so we have a tremendous opportunity to move into larger accounts and expand. And I think really with the speed at which we are rolling out new capabilities and so forth, it really is the discipline around go-to-market, but it's really just removing friction everywhere, removing friction with onboarding, which we can do more now with AI. It's removing friction in go-to-market, just getting better and better at it. So it really is around making sure that our sellers are enabled and can go out in the field and make it easier for customers to adopt. So I would say in general, it's never one thing, but I would say that's it. We want to remove the friction, remove the blockers to expansion because we have a lot of opportunity with adding additional capabilities to our customers' accounts.

One of the things you said earlier was about Workiva becoming agentic first. Can you tell us a little bit more about that, and what does that change for your customers that might not have been possible with a traditional software platform?

So SaaS platforms have the opportunity to leverage AI and leverage agentic AI. And the difference being agentic AI moves you into the realm of being able to reason and do more work and execute on customers' behalf. And in fact, software up until the end of last year, it really existed to help streamline work. It was assisting users and helping them do their job faster and better. It was helping customers do their work. Now, software with agentic AI can do more of the work for the customer. It actually can take on some of that work because it can reason and take action and execute. And so you need to ensure that your platform can handle that agentic AI and capabilities. In order to do that, what really makes it effective is being able to understand your customer's business, understand their organization, the context, the framework they use, the controls, everything about the business that's leveraged when you are doing regulatory work. And so we are building out the data model, the semantic understanding of our customers. That moves that platform into being one where we can leverage agentic AI. And so what that does then is once we have that understanding of the customer and learn more about the customer, we can do more of the work for them, which is helpful to the customer and brings more value, not just assist in the human part of it, but we can actually execute on work. We can onboard them faster. We can connect their capabilities to one another, leveraging the similar data in the platform. We can do more AI. So the customer benefits in having more work done by WorkEva. They're always in control. They can select the level of autonomy they want. They can be in as much as they want and understand as much as they want. But it gives us the ability to serve them differently by doing more of the work that they would historically do, particularly the repeatable work, particularly the work that frees them up to do other things. But it really can do, agentic AI is the game changer and the reason we would want to make those changes in the platform. And it's nothing new. We've been working on this for the past year and we're already leveraging it in some of the capabilities that we're rolling out.

And so, obviously, regulatory reporting and compliance are highly sensitive areas. You talked a little bit about defensibility and audibility as crucial components of the platform. within that where are customers showing the greatest willingness to let an agent execute work rather than simply just be an assistant for a human it's probably and it has been and we've watched this it's where the work is well defined where the work is repeatable and where the work can be validated, that you can actually check and make sure when you let AI do it.

That's how, in the early phases, how companies typically work. They adopt the AI capabilities where they can validate it and where it's pretty well-defined work. But you can see as they get more comfortable and they validate and go, yeah, it did work. Yes, it was right, that they're willing to do more and more and adopt more and more that is less well-defined or that is less for people or that is, you know, less validatable. But still, in the office of CFO, and we are very well aware of this, you need the judgment of those users of the platform. You need to ensure that they are in control and they pick the level of autonomy, right? We want to make it so that they can choose. We want to help them. We want to do more of the work for them, but we want them to make the decision on how much of the work they want us to do. I think that's pretty important.

You kind of touched on this, but when I think about Workiva's data and governance advantage, why does AI make that advantage more valuable?

I think you're hearing this from a lot of companies who have this capability to do governance and security. The more you use AI and the more that the software does for you, the more you're going to want to make sure that you trust, that you trust the data, that you trust the technology, and that you're able to trust the outcomes. If you're going to delegate to agents and let software do work for you, you're going to want to make darn sure that you can trust, that data needs to be trusted, the platform that's doing the work can be trusted, and you can't just say, okay, do I trust them or not? You need to be able to prove it. Every outcome out of the WorkEva platform is whether an agent is doing the work through our MCP gateway or a human's doing the work. If AI is working on it, you're going to want to be able to defend it. I mean, you're going to want to be able to explain every number and even the narrative where it came from and how it changed over time through the system. And that is incredibly important when software is doing more of the work and more and more, you know, AI is doing the work. So trust becomes incredibly valuable. It's always been valuable, but even here in an environment with AI, it's, again, software taking on more of the work.

So you mentioned the MCP gateway lets your customers connect outside models and agents to Rekiva. Within that, how do you remain the strategic platform if the intelligence increasingly is coming from somewhere else?

And you mean intelligence coming from everyone else, the models, the large language models and so forth, a quad, et cetera. So that's one element of intelligence, right? That's one layer of intelligence, the models. But they're only as good as the data that they act on, and that's the value of WorkEva. A CFO knows that the data coming out of there and the results coming out will be trusted. When the customer leverages or the agents of the customer leverage the MCP gateway, what comes with it is traceability, is data lineage, is defensibility, is auditability, right? It doesn't just, the data doesn't come out. It comes with all of that. And that is the value. That's the true value of the WorkEva platform. So, yes, we want to be open. We want our customers to leverage their technology ecosystem. We want them to bring their tools. We want them to build on our platform. We want them to do whatever they want, but the real value that they're getting, again, is what's coming in the platform, that traceability, that defensibility. That is a necessity, right? Sure, you can use Claude on your ERP and leverage it within your company, but you can't, every time you're called upon, you can't have the traceability, the auditability, and the defensibility, which a CFO knows is the thing that determines their reputation, of course, the company's.

So what should investors be watching for to get some visibility into your agents moving from just customer interest into meaningful adoption and economic value?

I think the real sign of whether or not our AI capabilities are effective and customers are leveraged is really the value it brings to the customer and the outcomes, right? What outcomes are they getting? Because we do look at adoption and we look at the measures of it, but it's not how many times you click or how many prompts you put in that is the measure of value. It's the outcome that comes out, and then it's how much they continue to want to do with your company. So I would look at its retention, its expansion. If they're getting value from our AI capabilities and it's helping them to do more work, we're doing more work for them, It's really about how they continue to invest with us. Then you know what you're rolling out and the capabilities are success. Customers want to know whether you're future-proofing them with technology. Are you staying current? Are you staying ahead for them so they don't need to do it? Can they leverage your technology and benefit from it and get better outcomes? And that's business growth, right? That's business growth. That's how you know you're doing the right job with the technology. So, yes, of course we look at adoption. We watch, we listen, we learn, and we see the use of more. But that's not the metric of whether or not a customer is getting the value from it, right? It really is about growth and expansion and opportunity for the customer to continue to do more with us, putting more on our platform. That's the true test.

So I want to ask a little bit about AI monetization. So you're placing many of your new AI capabilities into some of your premium pricing tiers. What needs to happen for AI to become a material growth driver for the business rather than some features that support pricing and retention?

So I'll answer it in two ways, and one, direct on the pricing, but also when you think about AI to change your business materially, it also comes into what I talked about before, which is AI lets us expand and build faster and innovate faster, which enables you to expand markets and have more to give the customer. It's not just an AI capability. It's more offerings for the customer. So that's really, for us, where we look at AI as an enabler of growth. What more can we do for the customer? What more can we offer them? How much more value can we bring? And that goes back to that initial question that you asked about expansion and what do we look like over the next one, two, three plus years, right? It's what can we build because of AI. But I'll go back to the pricing model, which is the initial core of your question, which is how and when do we see value from it? And we're just getting started. I mean, we put AI into the platform and every workflow and every solution across the portfolio, and that's table stakes and available for everyone. We began putting out solution-specific AI capabilities, and we offer those in our solutions. And then we realized we're bringing out very advanced capabilities, bringing even more value to the customer and doing more work for the customer. So we put that into our already existing good, better, best model. So we have essentials and a standard and a premium or an advanced tier. So we've been putting our advanced capabilities there, letting customers work with those. We've been watching adoption of that. We've been watching how they use it. We've been watching which things resonate more and bring more value. So we're learning. But we're doing it in a way that they have predictability on the pricing, and we have predictability on the bookings coming in, right, and the revenue. So it's been a really practical model, a good model for us to introduce our advanced AI capabilities. And it's working well in the areas that we've introduced it. We've seen uptick of greater than 20% when customers move into that advanced model. And we're going to continue to leverage it. It's a practical way for us to introduce all these advanced capabilities and for customers to leverage them without concern about having to pay and use more and so forth. So it's been good. It's a very predictable model on both sides.

And so your pricing is already based on value and usage rather than a seat-based model. How does that position you differently as agents perform more of the work and you see this adoption increase?

Sure, and we're very fortunate. We are one of the companies, one of the very few application companies that isn't seat-based. And we have been for a while now, six, seven years, charging customers for value usage. And what I mean by that is if you're a company that has our multi-entity reporting solution, we charge based on the number of entities you use, not the number of people that go into our platform and use it. And this is great when you move to the world of AI because we don't care if a human goes in or an agent goes in or you don't go in as long as you're getting value from the platform. So number of controls is what we use when you buy our control solution. And it just so happens that the larger and more complex you are, the more you will end up paying because the more entities you have, the more controls you have, the larger company you have, the more data integrations you have. And these are the kinds of proxies we have for complexity and size and usage of a company. So we've been very fortunate that we've had that pricing framework for many years now. And it plays very nicely in AI because, say, you're a customer in the top tier with us. You can look at a billion-dollar company and a $50 billion company, both of which we serve. And the billion-dollar company will pay X amount for a premium tier. But a $50 billion company will pay Y amount for the premium tier because they are using more of the platform, more controls, more entities, more data integration. So we are charging more if you're going to be leveraging more AI already. So we're already kind of tiered pricing within a tier, if you will, but we're set up and well-positioned to be able to charge in this way and to charge for AI. So very helpful.

So in the beginning when we were talking about some of your 2030 targets, you had mentioned on how you're tracking ahead, the 27 targets, especially on the margin side. You've made some really strong progress over the past number of quarters. So I'm curious, how do you think about the balance between generating that operating leverage versus investing into some of these AI products and growth areas?

Sure. And I think another kind of misunderstood, we can do both, right? We can invest in and grow our current business. We can expand the business we have today and move into other offerings and expand our TAM, an adjustable market. and we continue to get to be a more efficient company. So we believe that productivity fuels the growth. And we believe we can do both. And we have been. We've been getting more efficient because of the way we've been operating, the way we've been growing, the way we've been scaling the business. Sure, leveraging AI to bring more efficiencies. So we're going to continue to do that. a lot more discipline at a billion dollars than you have at $500 million, and we assume that's going to continue, which is why we have those 20, 30 targets. So we intend to continue in that mode of improved operational effectiveness and efficiency, but we also intend to continue to go to the business. And yes, AI makes that even more possible and contributes to our ability to do that. It used to take a long time to build TAM. It's a lot quicker now when you have that TAM in your mind, how you can leverage your, I'll call it again, earned advantages. So we believe we can do both. It's not an either-or. It's still not an either-or for WorkEva.

And so one of the things I also wanted to ask on some of your more premium pricing tiers, and you talked a little bit about this with serving a $1 billion customer versus a $50 billion customer. When you think about the early adoption that you're seeing of customers moving up to those tiers, Are there any characteristics that they share? Is it some of the larger customers, or is it a mix? And do you see that premium pricing tier being something that's applicable to the entire customer base?

I do ultimately see it being applicable. Customers come, as you know, at different points in time. Some are just becoming a public company, and so they're not ready to do beautiful design reports or financial statement automation and so forth. They're fine with a basic or a standard package, and then there are others that are farther along in their journey. So they would like all of it. Financial statement automation and these AI capabilities, many customers look at them as table stakes already. So I do think ultimately we can expand more of the base. But we'll be candid and realistic. There is a portion of the companies that we have that we've had for decades that may never move on and take more advanced capability. But, you know, the companies today that are going public, that are growing, that are healthy, are ready to expand. I mean, that's why oftentimes we will land with, you know, an advanced package for a customer.

So you've announced some leadership changes recently. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Sure. We did bring on a new CRO, we brought in a new CFO, and we brought in a new chief product officer, all since the beginning of the year, maybe Q4 and Q1. And we did it because billion dollars, hitting the billion dollars this year. We've had some executives that had been with us for a number of years that hadn't yet seen the scale and the growth and where we're going and the multimillion dollars. So we brought on a chief revenue officer that had come from Databricks and AWS and SAP and had seen the scale and knows what a go-to-market machine looks like. And he has worked with partners, knows how to sell higher in organizations and engage with C-suite executives. So he's come in and running our go-to-market organization. Barbara Larson, our CFO that we brought in, spent 15-plus years at VMware, was at Workday for a decade and even worked her way up to be the CFO of Workday. So she comes through that scale as well and understands what a strong financial organization looks like through scale and has done the expanding margin and growth. And then we also brought Deepak Bharadwaj, who is in product and leading organizations and product organizations, both at ServiceNow for several years and then Adobe. So he's lived the life at scale as well. And having them at the executive level now in the organization has enabled us to think well beyond where we are today and just scale in an organization moving to the $2 and $3 billion. So just a representation of the way we're moving now, and it isn't just at the executive leadership level. We've moved to bringing on executives across our senior leadership level, our operational leadership level, in our technology organization. Part of it is you can attract, you know, talent that has been there and done that now and seen the movie. Part of it is that. Part of it is our drive to bring in those who are familiar with scale and execution at the level we are and ready to take us to the next. But we're pleased with the team and the growth and their ability to execute and scale the organization.

Great. So we're almost at time. So I'd like to just finish with one more high-level question. When you think about Workiva today as well as your vision for the business, What do you think is the most underappreciated aspect by investors?

I think it is that we have a strong business today, and we can make it stronger and grow it even more. The current business that we have today that got us to a billion dollars, but at the same time, because we have been transforming our platform, we can also extend that platform, that platform we've been transforming to be a Gentic First, we can extend that platform into new offerings and new growth areas to get at that vision that you and I talked about early on with the multi-year vision to become that platform that really organizations can rely on to manage regulatory work. So I think the dual approach, the strength of the business today and the growth of the business today in conjunction with not instead of expanding what we do, I think that's underappreciated. And we're able to do it because of AI, because we are innovating quickly, and because we are transforming the platform to an agentic-first platform. So new technology is enabled a lot. And if SaaS companies can take advantage of that and leverage and capitalize on it, the opportunity is tremendous. And we believe that opportunity is there for us at WorkEva.

Great. We are all out of time, but Julie, thank you so much for joining me on today's show.

Thank you. I appreciate being here, and thank you all for joining us today.